What Is Staff Augmentation? Benefits and Best Practices

As business priorities continue to rapidly evolve and shift, more organizations are thinking beyond traditional recruitment strategies—such as exclusively relying on full-time, in-house employees—and turning to alternative staffing solutions. Staff augmentation is an effective outsourcing model to consider as part of your organization’s broader staffing management plan or talent planning efforts.

Staff augmentation is designed to supplement an in-house team with qualified resources and can be an efficient way to address skills gaps and meet project deadlines and objectives. Learn about what staff augmentation is, how the process works, key benefits, common challenges, and more.

If you’re looking to implement a staff augmentation strategy immediately, consider engaging a talent acquisition specialist on Upwork to work with you on the process. Experienced talent acquisition specialists are available to share staff augmentation best practices, help you identify your skills needs, and source qualified talent for your organization.  

What is staff augmentation?

Staff augmentation is the practice of expanding an organization’s capabilities by tapping into the skills and expertise of external talent. A staff augmentation model is an effective solution when businesses need additional support or specialized expertise beyond the capabilities and bandwidth of internal workers.

An augmented staff helps companies meet their current business needs without the added fixed costs and resources associated with hiring additional full-time employees. Examples of staff augmentation include engaging a training and development specialist to implement a new talent development plan or adding additional customer service representatives during a peak business season.

How staff augmentation works

Initially, staff augmentation was practiced by the IT industry and tech startups to address a lack of tech talent in an ever-expanding industry that included general IT professionals, software development teams, and cybersecurity experts.

Over the years, staff augmentation expanded beyond IT and tech and has seen significant growth along with the broader global staffing industry, which is projected to reach $650 billion in 2025.

The staff augmentation process typically begins when an organization identifies a need for additional staff and is looking for alternative solutions rather than adding full-time employees. Staff augmentation is managed by an external provider or online talent platform, which sources, evaluates, and hires qualified candidates who align with a company’s skills needs, business requirements, and budget.

Staff augmentation engagements are often paid on an hourly or fixed-price project basis, while some providers may also have a retainer price structure in which organizations pay a set monthly fee for a certain number of hours each month.

Types of staff augmentation

Different types of staff augmentation are available to choose from depending on your business goals and needs. Learn more about common staff augmentation paths below.

Short-term augmentation

This approach is used to bring in temporary external workers for brief periods of time, often less than six months. Needs for short-term augmentation may include covering in-house employee absences (such as parental leave or sabbatical), providing support for short-term projects, or managing temporary spikes in workload.

Short-term augmentation is highly flexible, as organizations can quickly engage talent for immediate, short-term needs. However, this model may not be the best for roles requiring lengthy onboarding or in-depth knowledge of the business.

Long-term augmentation

While short-term augmentation is intended for smaller projects, long-term augmentation involves integrating external professionals into an organization, typically for six or more months. This model is beneficial for companies that require ongoing additional support, but either don’t have the resources for full-time personnel or require long-term, specialized skills—as opposed to in-house generalist roles. For example, a marketing team may engage a team of external writers, or a software engineering team may bring in long-term, external web developers. 

Long-term augmentation enables deeper integration for externally engaged workers, which can be helpful in instances when the worker needs to have detailed knowledge about company processes, workflows, culture, and business goals.

On-demand augmentation

On-demand augmentation is a flexible type of staff augmentation in which companies can access talent quickly to scale up or down based on immediate business needs. This model is especially advantageous for businesses or industries with seasonal project demands—such as an accounting firm bringing in external accounting professionals during tax season or an e-commerce company engaging on-demand workers during the holiday season.

While the two may seem similar, short-term augmentation and on-demand augmentation have distinct differences. Short-term augmentation engagements are often planned in advance, have a predetermined duration, and have a defined scope. On the other hand, on-demand augmentation isn’t necessarily planned proactively; it’s used to support sudden needs and can have greatly varying scope and duration.

Skill-specific augmentation

This type of staff augmentation aims to bring in professionals with specific skills or expertise currently unavailable on the existing team. As an example, if an organization is looking to add a chatbot to the business website, the team may have a talented team of web developers, but the developers lack specific skills or experience in chatbot development. If this is the case, the company may engage an external chatbot developer.

Skill-specific augmentation can be helpful when an organization needs to access highly specialized skills for a short period of time or if the company wants to make a case for adding long-term support in a specific area of expertise.

Project-based augmentation

Through project-based augmentation, external professionals are added to the team for the entirety of a specific project. Augmented workers collaborate closely with internal team members until the project is completed.

For example, if an organization is completing a brand redesign, it may engage a designer or a team of designers to support internal workers for the duration of the project. This approach is beneficial for accessing specialized skills that aren’t necessarily needed long term at an organization.

Key benefits

Staff augmentation services offer a flexible, alternative staffing solution to access specialized skills and increase resources within an existing dedicated team, either short-term or long-term.

Benefits of staff augmentation include:

• Staffing flexibility and scalability. Staff augmentation can simplify the process of scaling your business and existing team up and down quickly and efficiently. Once a staff augmentation provider or an online talent platform understands your business needs, you can access a large pool of qualified talent, enabling your team to adjust your workforce based on project, skill, or seasonal demands. As a result, your company can better respond to disruption and business shifts.
• Cost-effectiveness. Embracing staff augmentation can help your business decrease fixed costs typically associated with full-time hiring, such as office space, training, and benefits. This process can also significantly reduce hiring time and costs, as your team can engage and begin working with augmented staff within a matter of days rather than enduring the lengthy hiring processes required for full-time, in-house positions.
• Access to specialized skills. Staff augmentation can be an ideal solution when a project requires specific skill sets your organization currently lacks. As in-demand skills rapidly evolve—such as the recent increased demand for artificial intelligence (AI) skills—your organization can quickly access and engage professionals with the skills you need. This approach is also effective if you don’t require certain skills on a long-term basis or are looking to evaluate whether permanently adding specific skills to your team may be worthwhile.
• Opportunities to engage talent on a trial basis. Staff augmentation can enable companies to engage potential team members for a trial period and consider whether to hire them full time. With this process, the company can take the time to determine if the specific skills are needed on the team permanently and whether the individual is a good fit for the current team and company culture. With Upwork’s end-to-end full-time hiring solution, you have the option to initiate contract-to-hire working relationships. This approach can enable your team to quickly fill skills gaps, engage workers for a trial period, and decide whether to expand into a full-time working relationship.‍
• Reduced hiring risks. The staff augmentation provider often oversees payroll and other HR-related tasks for augmented team members, which can reduce internal administrative costs and resources. The right provider will also have integrated compliance capabilities and worker classification services to minimize risks when you engage external talent.

When to consider staff augmentation

Staff augmentation can be an effective strategy for organizations to expand their capabilities and has a range of use cases depending on your specific business needs.

Instances when you may consider staff augmentation include:

• Addressing project-based needs when the work is time-sensitive and extends beyond your team’s bandwidth
• Filling skills gaps with specialized talent, especially for emerging or in-demand skills  
• Covering team shortages when individuals exit an organization or take a leave of absence
• Meeting increased demand during peak seasons, such as the holiday season in retail and logistics
• Supporting business expansion, including exploring new markets, launching new products or services, or targeting a new target audience
• Managing costs by engaging augmented staff for a short period of time, which reduces total hiring costs and fixed costs compared to bringing in full-time team members  

Staff augmentation vs. outsourcing

Understanding the differences between staff augmentation and outsourcing is essential to choosing the solution that best aligns with your business needs. Through staff augmentation, the hiring organization directly oversees the augmented staff; external workers are integrated into the business, collaborating closely on projects with your team. With outsourcing services, your company is less involved in managing external workers and the day-to-day execution of desired deliverables. Additionally, outsourced workers aren’t necessarily integrated into your existing team.

Some other differences between the two include the types of skills needed, flexibility, and cost structure. Staff augmentation primarily focuses on addressing specific skills gaps and increasing the capacity of existing teams, while outsourcing may involve transferring entire functions, teams, or projects to an external party. Because of this, staff augmentation tends to have more flexibility to scale external resources up or down, while outsourcing may require contract negotiation to update the scope.

In terms of cost structure, staff augmentation is often billed on an hourly or fixed-price project basis, while outsourcing initiatives have retainers or outcome-based pricing.

How to implement staff augmentation

Implementing staff augmentation requires up-front planning and initiation. By taking a proactive, step-by-step approach to defining and launching your staff augmentation strategy, your organization can reap the long-term benefits.

Steps include:

1. Identify your needs
2. Choose the right provider
3. Onboard and integrate augmented staff
4. Manage and monitor performance
5. Evaluate and adjust

Step 1. Identify your needs

Understanding your needs from a talent and skills perspective is an important first step to take if you’re considering implementing staff augmentation. This clear definition can help inform other steps in the process.

As you identify your needs, take the following details into consideration:

• Short-term and long-term business objectives
• Available skills on your existing team
• Immediate and future skills gaps in your workforce
• A list of skills or roles that are a better fit for full-time, internal workers versus augmented staff
• Required technical or industry expertise
• Soft skills or team collaboration requirements
• Project scope and timelines for staff augmentation initiatives
• Budget and cost considerations
• Scalability and flexibility requirements
• Project management, reporting, and accountability structures
• Compliance and intellectual property considerations

Step 2. Choose the right provider

Selecting a proven, experienced staff augmentation partner can help your organization effectively engage qualified talent to support broader business objectives. Vet staff augmentation providers by conducting research on your own and scheduling meetings with each provider on your short list to gain additional insight into their offerings and benefits.

As you evaluate different staff augmentation providers, consider these questions:

• What is the staff augmentation provider’s specialty, focus area, or industry expertise?
• Which specific services does the potential provider offer?
• How does the provider source and vet talent?
• How skilled and diverse is the available talent pool?
• What’s the provider’s average time to hire or time to kick off projects?
• How much experience does the prospective staff augmentation provider have with projects relevant to your specific needs?
• How does each provider differentiate from others available on the market?
• What is the provider’s pricing structure, and how do the costs align with your budget?
• Can the staff augmentation partner customize service offerings or pricing depending on your company’s business requirements?
• How flexible are the provider’s contracts in scaling up and down as business needs shift?
• How does the staff augmentation provider manage communication and project management?
• Does the staff augmentation partner have a positive reputation based on client reviews, case studies, or industry awards?
• How does the provider maintain compliance with employment law and ethical standards?

Upwork is a proven global work marketplace that supports your staff augmentation needs. Through Talent Marketplace™, your organization can quickly access and engage qualified talent, collaborate directly in the platform using Upwork Messages, manage safe, easy payments with Upwork Payment Protection, and receive 24/7 customer support.

Step 3. Onboard and integrate augmented staff

By engaging external workers through staff augmentation, you can reduce the time, resources, and costs associated with onboarding compared to hiring full-time, in-house employees. The right staff augmentation provider will handle administrative onboarding paperwork, so your team doesn’t have to. Augmented staff also already possess the skills you need for specific projects and can quickly dive in and start driving business outcomes.

While onboarding may be more streamlined for augmented team members, including some onboarding best practices and steps can help ensure new workers supporting your team feel welcome, understand your internal processes, and effectively integrate into your team.

Onboarding steps to consider for staff augmentation include:

• Scheduling an orientation meeting to introduce new team members to your organization’s mission, vision, core values, goals, and other high-level information
• Introducing augmented staff to internal employees with whom they’re most likely to interact and collaborate
• Meeting with each new augmented team member one-on-one to reiterate goals, expectations, and milestones for the project
• Sharing an overview and granting access to your organization’s communication and collaboration tools, such as video conferencing software, messaging apps, project management systems, and shared documents
• Explaining internal communication processes and frequency, such as sending direct messages rather than scheduling a meeting for quick questions or adding updates to project management software each day

Step 4. Manage and monitor performance

Proactively monitoring performance can help you build successful relationships with augmented staff and increase the likelihood of driving positive business outcomes.

Here are some ways to manage and monitor performance with augmented staff:  

• Schedule regular check-ins. In addition to setting up a meeting during onboarding, scheduling recurring one-on-one check-ins with all workers on your team—both internal and external—can help ensure projects stay on track and questions or conflicts are resolved quickly. Also, schedule regular team check-ins to share updates, touch base on timely projects, and answer questions. Consider recording team check-ins to share with any workers who can’t attend.
• Use project management tools. Use project management tools such as Asana, Hive, and Trello to monitor projects, collaborate on updates, and adapt plans as needed based on feedback or shifting timelines. Project management software can help both internal and external workers track tasks and deliverables within a project, meet deadlines, and reduce meeting time for incremental project updates.‍
• Provide constructive feedback. To help augmented staff improve over time, give professional feedback that reiterates expectations set during onboarding and offers actionable advice. Tie feedback to business goals to help individuals understand how their work impacts overall business success. Share examples of similar work completed in the past so augmented staff can understand your expected deliverables and results. Rather than sharing all feedback over email, direct message, or in a shared document, carve out time during one-on-one conversations to discuss feedback in more detail.

Step 5: Evaluate and adjust

Similar to managing and monitoring the performance of the workers you engage for your team, evaluating and adjusting your staff augmentation strategy over time can help your organization maximize results. Data and analytics can help your team understand what’s working and what’s not with your staff augmentation efforts and make data-driven decisions to drive improvements over time.

Metrics to track as you evaluate your staff augmentation practices include:

• Time to completion for projects or tasks
• Rounds of revisions required for key project deliverables
• Percentage of deliverables or projects completed on deadline
• Total output or productivity rate of augmented staff compared to in-house team members
• Costs and return on investment (ROI) of your staff augmentation strategy
• Recruitment and onboarding time and cost savings compared to full-time team members
• Number or percentage of skills gaps filled by augmented staff
• Team collaboration and engagement scores
• Augmented staff retention, contract renewal, or conversion to permanent positions rate
• Staff augmentation provider response time and issue resolution rates

Best practices for staff augmentation

Following proven best practices can help your organization successfully implement staff augmentation and drive improved business outcomes as a result.

Consider the best practices below as you develop a staff augmentation plan:

• Ensure clear communication. Offer access to collaboration and communication tools and encourage open communication between augmented staff and in-house team members. Be sure to set clear expectations for communication frequency and channels to encourage seamless collaboration between all workers.  
• Establish defined processes. A lack of defined processes can lead to inconsistent experiences, confusion, and delayed projects and business outcomes. Develop and document processes, such as onboarding steps, tool and software access management procedures, project management standards, and feedback methods to stay organized and keep both augmented staff and internal team members engaged.  
• Consider team culture fit. Engaging augmented workers who can collaborate well with your team is just as important as finding talent with the right skills. As you evaluate potential external professionals for your staff augmentation efforts, ask each individual questions related to how they handle feedback, work with others, resolve issues or challenges, and share progress updates on projects.
• Provide training and development. In addition to initial onboarding, offer long-term augmented staff opportunities for training and talent development so they can continue to build their skills and align with your evolving business needs. A few ways you can support this include extending access to online learning platforms and scheduling team or company-wide training sessions.  ‍
• Focus on continual improvement. Leverage data analytics to track business outcomes tied to your staff augmentation efforts and identify improvements over time. Also consider gathering feedback from both internal team members and augmented staff about the process of working with one another and implement feedback to drive continual improvement.

Common challenges and solutions

While staff augmentation can offer many benefits to businesses across industries, considering and addressing potential challenges can help your organization develop and implement an effective strategy.

Common challenges and associated solutions include:

• Team integration issues. Because many augmented staff members are remote workers and are engaged for short periods of time, they may face challenges integrating with your team or feeling a sense of belonging. Whether you’re adding new internal team members, augmented staff, or on-site service providers, ensure all team members feel welcome and understand their roles and responsibilities. Consider pairing each new augmented worker with an onboarding mentor to help answer common questions. Also, centralize details related to team processes and other information to help new workers effectively acclimate to the company.
• Lack of internal knowledge. With staff augmentation, engaged workers may not possess the same internal business knowledge as internal team members. To avoid challenges with augmented staff, clearly communicate your organization’s mission, vision, goals, and specific project objectives from the start. In the absence of effective communication, outsourcing can slow down the overall project completion time. Also, share any internal resources or schedule training sessions to convey essential internal knowledge to external workers.
• Communication barriers. Ineffective or inconsistent communication can lead to roadblocks when working with augmented staff. In addition to extending access to collaboration tools during onboarding, encourage effective asynchronous communication such as emails, comments in shared documents, and updates in project management tools. This approach can help streamline communication between internal team members and augmented staff while reducing meeting time. Asynchronous communication is particularly beneficial when overseeing a team distributed across time zones or with varying working hours. ‍
• Security concerns. Passwords and logins to company systems are often shared with augmented staff, which can present security risks or concerns. External team members may also have access to sensitive business information or trade secrets. Consider requiring staff augmentation vendors to sign a nondisclosure agreement or other security-related paperwork before starting any projects.

Summary

Adopting staff augmentation can help your organization more effectively access talent with the in-demand skills you need and better respond to business and labor market disruption.

By understanding how staff augmentation works, the different types available to your team, actionable steps to implement staff augmentation, best practices, and challenges, your company can successfully integrate augmented staff into your team. As a result, your organization can support mission-critical business objectives and projects.

Engage talent with the skills you need on Upwork

While implementing a staff augmentation strategy requires careful thought and consideration, the process doesn’t have to be daunting. Upwork can help you access and engage independent skilled professionals to augment your existing internal team.

Multiple options are available to help you augment your staff with independent talent from Upwork, including:

• Access the top 1% of talent through Business Plus. Connect with pre-screened, expertly matched freelancers and agencies with the highest levels of reliability and competence.
• Leverage Upwork Managed Services, a fully remote outsourced delivery option that can help you scale up or down as your business priorities shift while driving cost efficiencies on mission-critical projects. Access highly skilled remote teams built from Upwork’s global talent marketplace and managed by expert project leads.
• Search Talent Marketplace™ for experienced independent artificial intelligence engineers, digital marketers, finance specialists, data analysts, and other professionals across more than 10,000 skills to augment your team.
• Use Project Catalog™ to search for one-on-one consultations and fixed-price projects. Once you find a project or book a consultation that aligns with your specific needs, you can begin working with an expert independent professional right away.